Along with fast development of information industry, a lot of knowledge and information have been digitalized and stored as digital data. For example, a variety of visible and invisible business information is converted into various digital data files. All the business information, though converted as accessible digital data files, should be the private property only belonging to the company. Some of the files are even considered as secretes of the company. Therefore, the access of those digital data files has to be properly controlled. For confidential purpose, every company does his best to prevent those digital data files from divulgement. Therefore, it is a more and more important issue to secure the digital data files against arbitrary access, especially in the era of knowledge economy.
When considering this issue, a hard disk drive is a big leak for the digital data security. FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram illustrating the typical data access in a computer. An operation system 10 sends out a read/write request that is processed by a driver 11, e.g. an integrated drive electronics (IDE) driver, to access data stored in a hard disk drive 12. The only requirement to access the hard disk drive 12 is to find a corresponding driver 11. Therefore, it is easy for anyone to read out the data stored in the hard disk drive by using a personal computer including the corresponding driver. Especially, for a removable hard disk drive that is originally designed to easily share data or make a redundant copy, the data access is even easier by connecting the removable hard disk drive to any personal computer including the corresponding driver. Therefore, the stealing or misusing problems of the data stored in the removable hard disk drive is more serious.
Therefore, the purpose of the present invention is to develop a method for securing stored data in a hard disk drive to deal with the above situations encountered in the prior art.